40k vs. Combine

To be fair, earth overwatch is the Combine equivalent of mall cops

Not cannon. Writing is a process in motion. The last draft laidlaw wrote probably would be widely divergent from what would end up in the finish project.

What we see is that the Combine are, for the most part, blocked off of Earth. The fact that colonial troops were chased off by a bunch of geriatrics is embarrassing.

Well the middle aged people and scientist are backed by an outside force that seems to be almost if not as powerful as the combine.

>reminder that Combine forces on Earth are literally just the equivalent of mall cops or UN Peacekeepers

I guess the Marine Corps are a bunch of pansies because they got murked by a nerd with a crowbar

>reminder that Hunters can be easily killed by shooting them with a .357 or throwing logs at them

Nerd wearing power armor that lets him sprint at like 50 km/h, tank bullets, and in HL2 does things like deliver morphine and stimulant drugs... Of course, as noted, the humans seem to have an extradimensional benefactor working to fuck over the Combine's plans on getting in-universe teleportation technology, or more.

>shooter gameplay is law
In the fluff, Hunters shrug off small-arms fire and are supposedly fast enough to dodge projectiles. And still, they're basically the equivalent of Scout Sentinels. Which are also capable of being killed by throwing logs at them.

No joke I want front row seats for a Tau vs Combine fight.

What fluff is this?
>And still, they're basically the equivalent of Scout Sentinels. Which are also capable of being killed by throwing logs at them.
You wot

you can punch a sentinel to death with cultist.
heck, you can punch a Knight to death with cultist.
Gameplay is never the best thing to really on for fluff.

why the Tau specifically?

I want to see the Tau react to headcrab shells

Wasn't always the case. And to kill a sentinel in a turn it takes about 50 cultists. Seems reasonable that they could do that, rioting mobs can flip armored cars and trucks so it's not that crazy.

And a miniatures dice game runs on much more abstraction than a videogame which depicts exactly what's happening in real time.

>muh Greater Good

Sounds like they are ripe to join the glory of the Universal Union

>Combine now have Kroot to play with

No 40k faction could take down the entirety of the Combine, if only for the reason that the Combine is an interdimensional empire and 40k factions presumably don't have a means of traveling between universes (assuming the Warp is tied to the 40k verse alone, and isn't something that exists between all possible universes). I don't doubt the Combine could take over a planet or even a few planets, but would they need or even want to expand beyond whichever planet they initially invade? It doesn't look like they're launching anything into space in HL2, so presumably they don't bother creating interstellar empires in every universe they colonise.

If you take the HL3 draft as canon, then the Combine have technology that allowed them to create at least one dyson sphere, which puts them on a pretty big boy level when it comes to space stuff, but I don't know if that alone puts them *beyond* any particular 40k faction.

On the ground level I don't know if anything we've seen the Combine in possession of would blow away most 40k stuff. Overwatch and synths are probably on an IG sort of level (though I don't doubt synths are pretty flimsy compared to some of the Imperium's more heavy duty stuff), and if the Combine has better we haven't seen it yet. Though, given the Combine's MO in the games I suppose it's entirely possible that if the Combine were to arrive on an Imperial world they could start cannibalizing and reverse engineering 40k level war tech.

Though, I suppose one possibility is that if an Advisor is classified as a Psyker and vulnerable to Chaos, if it got corrupted or possessed it could fuck things up for the Combine rather heavily if it was able to bring Chaos with it to the rest of the interdimensional Empire.

This thread also reminded me that this ancient piece of writefagging exists: 1d4chan.org/wiki/Half_Life_40k

Yeah, I guess you do have a pretty good point just in regards to their MO. If the Combine were to show up, they'd likely just take a system, set up shop, and not really give a shit about the rest of the galaxy.

Probably not. The Combine are DESPERATE for FTL/transporation. A dyson sphere they may have, but the ability to move quickly and efficiently within-universe is something they don't have. They would be all over something like white on rice if they thought it would give them efficient FTL, and once they have that... well, that opens a lot of doors for them

Yeah, and given the 40k 'verse, I can't really imagine it'd be a place they care about much at all. Warp travel is pretty worthless if you're a bureaucratic multidimensional empire, and that's not even including the chance it's bound purely to the 40k 'verse. Webway is possibly of interest, but I dunno how easily they'd be able to reverse-engineer a means of creating it in their other dimensions. Necrons really are the only ones with the technology they are looking for, but that'd also require the planet they arrive on knowing about Necrons and their star-drives.

More likely, you'd just have the same kind of backwater mallcop outpost that Earth is while they keep rolling the dice and hoping to get something along the lines of 99% of other sci-fi universes.

That's true, it's possible they'd hit "random farm backwater #34,387 of the imperium, conquer it, and go "great, more fucking corn" and strip-mine it until it was just a ball of dust, not even encountering more than initial resistance and small arms tech that would get assimilated.

It's a moot question, the Combine don't have FTL and no one in 40k has any reasonable way of dimension hopping or the strength to actually go toe to toe in an inter dimensional fight. And, y'know, we don't even know what the Combine are capable of in actuality.

The Combine just roll the dice as to where their portals end up so presumably the vast majority of universes are completely untouched as the portal opened up in a cosmic void or just too far away for sublight travel to matter. It's why they sperged the fuck out of Black Mesa and Aperture's efforts.

The Combine would either completely subjugate an entire planet, strip it barren, and then fuck off without the Imperium noticing OR they'd just get their shit pushed in so hard they'd just write off the 40k dimension as not being worth the hassle. Again, since we don't know exactly what the Combine can actually field the level of firepower needed to make the Combine fuck off could very well be something like that of Terra or Mars but that's just playing with some arbitrary limit because, again, the Combine can't actually invade anywhere once they've taken a foothold.

>defeated
Nigga what
Earth is a small-time mining operation to them

So the Combine are dependent on local transportation and technology once they've made their way into a galaxy. There are exactly three top candidates for fucking up so supremely that they accidentally a resonance cascade and bring them into the 40K galaxy.
Adeptus Mechanicus dicking around with archeotech
Dark Mechanicus dicking around with archeotech/warp bullshit
T'au accidentally discovering a means of plausible teleportation and tearing a hole beyond the Warp and Materium.

2:1 T'au fuck this up for the galaxy. So we're dealing with a species that utilizes dark energy as its bread and butter vs solar, radioactive, plasma, ionization thero, fusion and fission levels of the T'au.

Effectively consulting the Kardashev scale, we can easily equate these two as the Combine being a Type-IV Civilization, capable of harnessing power and energy that are extragalactic, and the T'au being a Type-II Civilization by both scale and technologic capacity.

Keep in mind that a Type-II Civ is capable of Dyson spheres, something that in old fluff many of us have seen occur in 40K, so we know it's plausible and applicable to most factions (Sans Tyranids.).

A Type-IV Civilization doesn't much give a damn about anything but acquiring more resources and learning more about each dimension and universe due to their superior engineering and understanding of what is in essence EVERYTHING.

Looking at Half-Life lore and mechanics, we can see that the standard armament of my Combine Soldiers is the Overwatch STandard Issue Pulse Rifle (AR-2 ). Firing miniature pulses of dark energy with a secondary firing mechanism that wrecks shit up with a condensed sphere of dark energy plasma that can shoot off like a God damned superball getting blasted out of a shotgun.

The T'au standard issue weapon is the Pulse Rifle, relatively similar to the AR-2 above yet it uses localized plasma pulses and in some cases ions (Because reasons, thanks GeeDubs...).

Comparing the bread and butter of each, while the T'au world responsible for unleashing these guys get rocked pretty God damned hard. The T'au being curious and diplomatic will likely receive a quick series of ultimatums or be forced to fight over an inner sphere world, threatening the entirety of their empire. With much similar and easily reproduced technology, those forces of the Combine present are likely to not only reinforce their foothold, but begin making necessary modifications to any craft available on the planet. The T'au basically fucking up beyond measure, will likely get caught in a dogged fight for about a month before the Combine get off world. Having discovered the Immaterium and how little the T'au have been capable of entering the warp, the Combine will make improvements while enslaving and slaughtering all resistance. Eventually the Ethereals will surrender the Empire after the core of the Empire has been taken over by these aggressors that they have unleashed. By this time the rest of the Galaxy is alerted.

The population of the Imperium is at least 8 quadrillion, user

Yeah, Necrons still beat em. Breath of Gods and Celestial Orrery friend. BoG destroys time itself.

40k nerds rektd.

Now with this information in the hands of merchants, refugees and even Rogue Traders, the Damocles Gulf is set to an even higher state of alert. With the whole galaxy spanning reality asshole that got torn into it however, the Imperium of Man will be slow to respond, if at all. The Eldar will take this threat very seriously, the Necrons will laugh dust out of their chasis, the Orks will find out there there's something new to fight and crump, Chaos will likely remain unbothered until such a time as they get their realms penetrated and the Tyranids are a moderate-severe threat to this plan.

The Combine Advisors will soon realize that most Tyranids are little more than beasts, right up until one of them fucks up and probes a synapse creature. Getting a taste of the Hive Mind is a very dangerous encounter and I am eager to figure how this would play out, but alas insufficient data. The Combine would know of how the T'au handled their first encounters with Tyranids and seek to replicate this with the addition of more problematic series of drones, rapid insertion and strike forces and nastier than usual weaponry. The Tyranids however are an in universe version of what a Type-III biologic civilization would be. They will pose a problem, should they ever attract the Hive Minds attention.

Orks would be a unique problem considering how the Old Ones rolled, however this can likely turn into an ancient series of rivalries being set aside. The Type-IV civilizations of the Eldar, Necrons and yes the Orks are surprisingly on par with what the Combine has available to them. Short of generating more reality assholes, the Combine are going to be hard pressed against any unified front.

Orks being stupidly tough, neigh impossible to truly, fully eradicate, practically innumerable, easily replaced, rapidly gestating and populating, mindblowingly effective scavengers and tinkerers, these guys would give the Combine one Hell of a thorn in their side.

The Eldar would be problematic with their tenancy to focus on all their usual knife-eared bullshit; do I really need to spell out the abuse of psychic assaults against the Combine? They're more or less fucked since so far we only know the Advisors would be considered "psykers" and thus far the most we've seen would be akin to maybe a beta psyker (Being very generous...).

The Necrons can fucking time travel. They're a Type-IV civ and are 40K equivalents of the Combine in range of tech. If the Necrons got roused, the Combine would be having a very difficult time with them, likely losing many or not most encounters.

>Orks being stupidly tough, neigh impossible to truly, fully eradicate, practically innumerable, easily replaced, rapidly gestating and populating

You're forgetting the Combine are in possession of specialized 'Suppression Fields' that can literally shut off an organism's ability to reproduce. Ork populations would become finite and easily manageable, assuming the Combine put up a Field in the right places.

Which were tailored to the gametes within humans. Without intricate knowledge of how orks reproduce, the Combine are up shitcreek wherever Ork spores are present. Whats more, if the Orks believe that "more boyz iz gunna spring up soon!" that suppression field means dick.

It's still low. A Dyson Sphere is so big that even if you only gave a one-page summary atlas entry on every continent-sized area one, it would require several millions of books and several thousand years to read. You would need not millions of worlds but several billion worlds to compete with a single Dyson Sphere. A single Dyson Sphere would easily wipe out any galactic empire portrayed in mainstream fiction. A billion-strong army would be the equivalent of sending a single 10-man squad to them.

Not even the Imperium is Type II. The Imperium is 1.4 to 1.7 at most. Even a whole, and I mean whole, sprawling Galactic Empire with billions of worlds just barely manages to match one Dyson Sphere in scale and power. Nerds routinely underestimate the Kardashev scale. A Type III is not a galactic Empire, a type III is a galaxy made of nothing but Dyson Spheres.

Everyone gets free hats.

>captcha: COUSTEAU pronto
Okay, he can have a hat first, but everyone else gets one too.

>combine occupation forces bitchified by gordon freeman
>regular rebels get their shit completely caved in
>alyx, barney, and the other geriatrics would be dead without gordon
>the same guy who bitchified the us military and an extradimensional alien empire once before

It's not that the Combine are weak, it's that Gordon is on an entirely different level. He could walk into the Warp with a crowbar and barrel and have every Chaos gods dead, every daemon obliterated, every Warp portal closed, and he'd still have time for lunch.

It says something that he's literally powerless against Advisors, though. The Combine are scary when they try.

>It's not that the Combine are weak, it's that Gordon is on an entirely different level. He could walk into the Warp with a crowbar and barrel and have every Chaos gods dead, every daemon obliterated, every Warp portal closed, and he'd still have time for lunch.
No he wouldn't. Is fucking evidence and feats just beyond the mental capabilities of Veeky Forums in these threads? Memes mean shit. Gordon Freeman is just an angry dude with a crowbar. Some bad luck and he'll get killed by an ordinary human with a simple assault rifle, and it wouldn't require that hard of a fuckup either as he's just a mortal man.

He's clearly getting help from G-Man.

Except it's not clear and he's ultimately just a normal human being. If he gets shot in the head by 7.62mm, he dies like any other man. Freeman is not some superhuman, but is just a regular old human being with no super powers who stumbles into shit like gravity guns.

Note how you don't refute the argument. Please, assign appropriate scaling to each faction, show your work.

>How could one man have slipped through your force's fingers time and time again? How is it possible? This is not some agent provocateur or highly trained assassin we are discussing. Gordon Freeman is a theoretical physicist who had hardly earned the distinction of his Ph.D. at the time of the Black Mesa Incident. I have good reason to believe that in the intervening years, he was in a state that precluded further development of covert skills. The man you have consistently failed to slow, let alone capture, is by all standards simply that--an ordinary man. How can you have failed to apprehend him?

While you are wanking Gordon pretty hard there, you have to understand that he is an exceptionally lucky human in full rage mode most of the time. In fact I'd go so far as to say that Freemans Mind is the most applicable head canon for how Freeman is and operates. An astonishingly calculating individual who solves his problems both pragmatically AND with high caliber fire. He's less reality breaking monster and most physics crunching badass. Sure he gets a push from time to time from the Vortigaunts and even his short chats with the G-Man, but these are external forces that are opting to go out of their way to include him in further circumstance.

But user used that as an appropriate benchmark, never even stated where the Imperium falls in this list. Just left it open ended as plausible and applicable to most factions, with exception for what the Tyranids are. What about the other posts?

They have Dyson Spheres so they will surely win

Sorry, but that's full of shit. Gordon's one of a rare class of super-human beings. He's an FPS protagonist.

This, a Tau Fire Warrior took down a greater Daemon solo because he was of the same class.

He isnt old, hes MAYBE mid 30s, as mentioned he had barely got his PhD, so he isnt too old.

Except he can get shot in the head by 7.62mm, and he's a-okay, though a medkit would make him more a-okay.

But if the Combine encounter the Necrons, wouldn't they then be able to get their star-drives, which are the closest thing in their universe to FTL travel besides the Warp?

Assuming the crons don't push their shit in.

>a pandimensional empire with entire universes' worth of assets against an empire that can't tell it's head from it's ass 9 times out of 10
not a contest, the combine out IG the IG without the IG being able to inflict any meaningful casualties on combine leadership, since they never take the field

That reminds me, people keep bringing up the fact how since the Combine are capable of building Dyson Spheres they are incredibly super powerful.

The Necrons have the Æonic Orb, a massive vehicle that literally has a miniaturized star inside it that is used by simply poking a whole in its containment field, letting out all of its heat and radiation in one beam.

While Dyson Spheres are impressive, I feel like something like that is a little bit more impressive.

It's possible an Advisor or a group of Advisors could nullify/overpower the Waaagh.

>miniaturized star
I think something along the lines of a planet-sized supercollider could achieve something like that. An impressive feat, and it speaks to their technological mastery, but the Dyson Sphere is a much larger undertaking and demonstrates the resources at the Combines disposal.

It's not just a mini star. It's an actual star, like a full size one, compressed into a tank sized sphere.

There's a huge problem here.
We have no idea how powerful the combine REALLY are. The earths Combine Overwatch seem to be the combine equivalent of pathetic local jobbers. The combine took over the vortigaunts homeworld, and all those other places where they get their synths from, but the thing is, apart from them scraping earth pretty clean of resources, and us knowing they have psychic space maggots for leaders, there's no telling what other creepy, potentially OP shit they have up their interdimensional-empire sized assholes.

He was 27 in HL1 and presumably in suspended animation since then

>Gordon Freeman got his Ph.D and saved the world by 28.

>I live in my mother's basement.

Fuck.

...

>leaders
Advisors are no more 'leaders' within the Combine than a McDonald's regional supervisor is 'leader' within the company.

That's less impressive. That's just gravity manipulation, which is commonplace in most sci-fi settings. It's on a grander scale, yes, but no more impressive.

People keep wanking over these dyson spheres but you got to understand that these are localized phenomena to the galaxies/universes that they've taken over. Yeah, it's neat, but it's not something that they use as their primary resource.draw. These fuckers are using straight up dark energy, an infinite resource. Whats more, their technology is easily replicated and can be reverse engineered by what are modern human equivalents, even when it isn't reverse engineered from something that they modified or manufactured in their local system.

Yeah, it's a neat trick, beat you that they wont do it again once they learn about the Warp!

>you will never be a combine soldier
>you will never fight and kill innocent rebel qts
>you will never kill girls that probably never even had sex due to the suppression field
>you will never have to clean up their limp bodies, the grime coating their pale thighs as you strip their corpses and load them into trucks to be burned
>you will never raid a rebel stronghold and mercilessly exterminate those within
>you will never look at their newspapers and coffee mugs, books, worn pictures of loved ones
>you will never realize these people were humans too
>you will never find a wounded qt being treated on a stained mattress, her leg wrapped in a dirty bandage, her doctor dead thanks to your comrades
>you will never level your gun to her head, ready to kill
>you will never have the slightest tinge of mercy, and leave her alone, telling the others the rebels are all dead
>you will never find out what happened to her

The hole deepens.

I would wager the Combine at large is similar to the US government on an epic scale. It may have a symbolic leader who wields a lot of power, but for the most part it's a labyrinth of bureaucracy that makes big things hard to get done in a timely fashion.

So do they have a mega maggot leader though?
Emperor maggot?

But thats the Adeptus Administratum...

Wait, so does this mean that the Imperium of Man and the Combine could get caught in a war of red tape against each other? Holy shit...

>Each side sending soldiers and bureaucrats to one another.
>Each side cycling each soldier and bureaucrat to the end of the queue due to having filled out the wrong forms or an oversight causing an invalidation of each form.
>Data-slates and autoquills marching off to wage a war of paperwork against a massive xenos menace

This is legitimately so stupid and boring that I am kind of interested in seeing how that could play out.

Could be a maggot, could be a brain in a jar, could be a supercomputer, could be a being of pure energy. Maybe they've been around so long they're basically on autopilot and have no grand leadership.

Like I said, they're not an impressive feat of technological prowess, they're an example of the sheer size of the Universal Union and the amount of resources they not only have access to, but they also must be able to allocate them very efficiently to make dyson spheres.

That's because Half Life is D&D: The first Person shooter.

Gordon was able to "defeat" them because he had a literal god controlling him from behind the scenes at every turn

source?

Half-Life writer Marc Laidlaw, who left Valve in 2016, revealed the proposed plot of Half-Life 2: Episode 3 on his personal website:

marclaidlaw.com/epistle-3/

>Except it's not clear
Bitch he SHOWS UP in HL2 after being placed there BY THE G-MAN

>Combine take over a planet that is also home to their portal
>The Tau just turn the local star into a supernova and call it a day after the water caste envoy has failed presumably

>exceptionally lucky
I thought the implication was that this part wasn't luck at all, but the influence of either G-Man and/or the Vortigaunts.

Necrons win and Orks have populated multiple galaxies.

Chaos is an interdimensional threat so they'd probably win too.

Keep in mind that the necrons have a weaponized sun. That would mess up a Dyson sphere something fierce. And that's just one of many surplus doomsday devices.

Orks alter reality. Nuff said.

Who would win:
A Spess Marine armed with his usual weapons and shit,
Or Gordon Freeman with a crowbar and access to speedrun techniques (bhop, perfect movement and aim etc. etc.)?

God is a bit much.

My guess is giant collective cyberbrain given their love of tech. Like the Geth or a Reaper

Looks like they do lose, considering aperture is built on combine tech.

I wanna know what black mesa is like when portal takes place.

Would a collaboration between Freeman, Doomguy, and Asura be enough to take over the 40K universe?

Freeman and Doomguy are sort of comparable. In their fluff the two have pretty wildly differing power levels, but in game Freeman can sort of match Doomguy, although he's not as ridiculous.

Why the FUCK is Asura here, just because he's angry? The better question would be, can Dante, Bayonetta and Asura take the 40k universe, to which the answer is - maybe, but you'll have to dig through the piss and shit of a thousand angry fans on either side to get anything resembling a solid argument.

Isnt it a crater due the nuke in Opposing Force?

Cave Johnson says that black mesa is a competitor so apparently they exist.

New black mesa?

Since Advisors can manipulate the flow of time all they'd have to do is get near the Warboss, freeze him, then eat his brain.

I recall either Valve or someone in-game mentioning that the invasion force that conquered Earth in seven hours was very small, basically a scouting party.

Depends on the warboss, beast or tuska level might jotero out of the world.

>Maybe they've been around so long they're basically on autopilot and have no grand leadership.
That'd be a pretty neat antagonist, and I dunno if I've really seen it before. Heroes attempting to rally and crush the evil empire's leadership in a suicidal attack on the central administrative capital, only to find out that the building's been out of use for centuries, been foreclosed upon, and is just filled with squatters. There's head to the snake, just a thousand writhing bureaucratic tendrils.

Holy shit, you cant kill an empire like that!

Its so big and bloateda without any central power to strike at

Basically. It's just this ever-expanding, ever-consuming behemoth that just keeps doing the same old routine ad infinitum, with basically every part of it disposable due to the level of automation.